Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I felt dubious about this information and pondered it like I’d pondered the thrusting business. Late that night, the workshop finally ended. We girls went to bed quietly, no doubt mentally numb from our strange seminar, exhausted from working and hungry from the diet. “Snip, snip,” Chris said, cutting the air with his fingers. “All the men have vasectomies.” He grinned sharply. “What’s a visectomy?” I asked, mispronouncing the word. We were shoveling loose dirt from a hole into a wheelbarrow. It was the weekend again, and I had been assigned to a team led by one of the men of the community. We were to dig long, narrow trenches for pipe installation. “It’s vasectomy, stupid. You know, it’s something in the balls.” “What are you talking about?” I said. The image of a plastic container of tennis balls came to my mind. “Balls.” Chris raised his eyebrows and struck the earth forcefully with his shovel, grimacing while he pressed down on the blade with his foot for a deeper gouge. “Balls, the baby-making part.” I suddenly understood. Was this something that he had learned in the sex workshop we were all forced to attend? I did not remember hearing it, but maybe the vasectomy information was only for the boys. “Their balls are cut off?” I asked. “No, it’s the part inside. It’s just the men, though. You have to be eighteen.” He grinned at me again, the kind of grin a boy gives when he’s trying to be brave. Although I later heard snatches of conversation between men and in the games on the Wire regarding vasectomies, I did not give it further thought. Later still, I learned the vasectomies were related to a program that also included forced abortions, another new word in my vocabulary. When I learned the meaning of the word “abortion,” I felt some sadness, but again there was also indifference on my part. I found it hard enough trying to figure out my own predicament, let alone the opaque and bizarre world of the adults. A year before I arrived to live in Synanon, Chuck Dederich had decided that he did not want any more children born into the commune; however, his analogy that childbirth was like a person crapping a football did little to quell the remorse and intense grief that women felt when they were forced to terminate pregnancies, some already advanced into midterm. “We’re not in the business of making babies here,” Chuck said. “Fuck, we bring in children. There are too many goddamned children in this world.” That was Chuck’s response to parents who begged for their unborn children’s lives. In a speech, “Childbirth Unmasked: Teachings,” Chuck ranted about the ills of having children and hoped to convince his members that birth was more ludicrous than miraculous. “Why does a woman want to have a baby?” he said. “Do you really know? Does a child mean value? Or is it just kind of a lark?

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  dvoKAens, és, inglorious, Il.9.22 (in poét. acc. δυσκλέᾶ for SuoHAcEa): —infamous, shameful, of persons and things, 6. θέα Aesch, Pr. 241 ; δυσκλεεστάτῳ μόρῳ Id. Pers. 4443; πρῶτον μὲν οὐκ οὖσ᾽ ἄδικός εἰμι δυσκλεής Eur. Hel. 270; also in Xen. Cyr. 3. 3, 53. Adv. -εῶς, Soph. El. 1006, Eur., etc. δύσκλεια, ἡ, ill-fame, an ill name, infamy, Soph. Fr. 196, Eur. Med. 218, Thuc. 3. 58, Plat. Legg. 653 A; éml δυσκλείᾳ tending to disgrace him, Soph. Aj. 143. II. ingloriousness, Dem, 1396. 18. δυσκλῃδόνιστοξ, ov, of ill name, boding ill, Luc. Amor. 39. δυσκληρέω, to be unlucky in one’s lot, esp. in standing for an office, opp. to Aayxavw, Plat. Legg. 6go C. δυσκλήρημα, τό, a piece of ill luck, Polyb. Exc. Vat. p. 437. δυσκληρία, 7, 222 luck, Basil. SvoKAnpos, ov, unlucky, A. B. 34. SuoKAys, poét. for δυσκλεής, Anth. P. 15. 22. δύσκλητος, ov, of ill-fame, infamous, Diocl. ap. Ath, 120 D. δυσκοίλιος, ov, bad for the bowels, causing costivity, Plut. 2.137 A. δυσκοινώνητος, ov, unsocial, Plat. Rep. 486 B. δυσκοιτέω, to have bad nights, Hipp. Vet. Med. 12, Acut. 388. δύσκοιτος, ov, making bed unpleasant, Aristaen. 2. 7. δυσκολαίνω, fut. ἄνῶ : impf. ἐδυσκόλαινον Plat. Phileb. 26 Ὁ :—to be peevish or discontented, Ar. Nub. 36; of a baby, Lys. 92. 36; to shew displeasure, Xen. Mem. 2. 2,8; δ. @s.. Plat. l.c. 2. to cause trouble or annoyance, οὔρησις δυσκολαίνουσα Hipp. 76 Ὁ. δυσκολία, ἡ, discontent, peevishness, Ar. Vesp. 106, Plat. Rep. 411 C. II. of things, difficulty, δ. ἔχειν Dem. 57. 2, Arist. Pol. 3. 10, 1; πλείους παρέχειν δυσκολίας Ib. 2. 5, 3. δυσκόλλητος, ov, hard to glue together, Galen. : ill-glued or fastened, loose, Luc. de Hist. Conscr. 11. δυσκολό-καμπτος, ov, hard to bend: ὃ. καμπή an intricate flourish in singing, Ar. Nub. 971. δυσκολό-κοιτος, ov, making bed uneasy, μέριμνα Ar. Nub. 420. δύσκολος, ov, (κόλον) : I. of persons, properly, hard to satisfy with food (cf. Ath. 262 A); but, generally, hard to please, discontented, fretful, peevish, Eur. Bacch. 1251, Ar. Vesp. 942, Plat., etc.; cf. Arist. Eth. N. 4.6, 2: of animals, intractable, Plat. Theaet. 174 D:—so in Adv., δυσκόλως ἔχειν Isocr. 67 C, Dem. 381. 29, etc.; δυσκολώτερον διακεῖσθαι Plat. Phaedo 84 E. II. of things, troublesome, harassing, ὃ. ἡ ἡνιόχησις Id. Phaedr. 246 B; of diseases, Hipp. 122 H, etc., v. Foés. Oecon.; generally, wxpleasant, Dem. 291. 21, Menand. Bowr. 2: τὸ δύσκολον Plat. Legg. 791 Ὁ. 2. difficult to explain, Arist. Soph. Elench. 25, 3, Metaph. 2. 4, 30: δ. ἐστι it is difficult, Ev. Marc. το. 24:— Adv. -Aws, hardly, with difficulty, Ib. το. 23, al. δύσκολπος, ov, with ill-formed womb, γαστήρ Anth. P. 7. 583. ϑυσκόμιστος, ov, hard to bear, intolerable, πότμος Soph. Ant. 1346; τέκνα Eur. H. F. 1423. δύσκοπος, ov, (κόπτων) hard to bruise, Damocrat. ap. Galen. 13. 636. δυσκρᾶής, ἔς, -- δύσκρατος, Opp. H. 2. 517.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  and it was no longer a question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Café. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing. Some of this Elroy must've understood. Not the details, of course, but the plain fact of crisis. Although the old man never confronted me about it, there was one occasion when he came close to forcing the whole thing out into the open. It was early evening, and we'd just finished supper, and over coffee and dessert I asked him about my bill, how much I owed so far. For a long while the old man squinted down at the tablecloth. "Well, the basic rate," he said, "is fifty bucks a night. Not counting meals. This makes four nights, right?" I nodded. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my wallet. Elroy kept his eyes on the tablecloth. "Now that's an on-season price. To be fair, I suppose we should knock it down a peg or two." He leaned back in his chair. "What's a reasonable number, you figure?" "I don't know," I said. "Forty?" "Forty's good. Forty a night. Then we tack on food—say another hundred? Two hundred sixty total?" "I guess." He raised his eyebrows. "Too much?" "No, that's fair. It's fine. Tomorrow, though ... I think I'd better take off tomorrow." Elroy shrugged and began clearing the table. For a time he fussed with the dishes, whistling to himself as if the subject had been settled. After a second he slapped his hands together. "You know what we forgot?" he said. "We forgot wages. Those odd jobs you done. What we have to do, we have to figure out what your time's worth. Your last job—how much did you pull in an hour?" "Not enough," I said. "A bad one?" "Yes. Pretty bad." Slowly then, without intending any long sermon, I told him about my days at the pig plant. It began as a straight recitation of the facts, but before I could stop myself I was talking about the blood clots and the water gun and how the smell had soaked into my skin and how I couldn't wash it away. I went on for a long time. I told him about wild hogs squealing in my dreams, the sounds of butchery, slaughterhouse sounds, and how I'd sometimes wake up with that greasy pig-stink in my throat. When I was finished, Elroy nodded at me.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Well, to be honest," he said, "when you first showed up here, I wondered about all that. The aroma, I mean. Smelled like you was awful damned fond of pork chops." The old man almost smiled. He made a snuffling sound, then sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper. "So what'd this crud job pay? Ten bucks an hour? Fifteen?" "Less." Elroy shook his head. "Let's make it fifteen. You put in twenty-five hours here, easy. That's three hundred seventy-five bucks total wages. We subtract the two hundred sixty for food and lodging, I still owe you a hundred and fifteen." He took four fifties out of his shirt pocket and laid them on the table. "Call it even," he said. "No." "Pick it up. Get yourself a haircut." The money lay on the table for the rest of the evening. It was still there when I went back to my cabin. In the morning, though, I found an envelope tacked to my door. Inside were the four fifties and a two-word note that said EMERGENCY FUND. The man knew. 3K OK ok Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward. None of it ever seemed real. During my time at the Tip Top Lodge I had the feeling that I'd slipped out of my own skin, hovering a few feet away while some poor yo- yo with my name and face tried to make his way toward a future he didn't understand and didn't want. Even now I can see myself as I was then. It's like watching an old home movie: I'm young and tan and fit. I've got hair— lots of it. I don't smoke or drink. I'm wearing faded blue jeans and a white polo shirt. I can see myself sitting on Elroy Berdahl's dock near dusk one evening, the sky a bright shimmering pink, and I'm finishing up a letter to my parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I'd never found the courage to talk to them about it. I ask them not to be angry. I try to explain some of my feelings, but there aren't enough words, and so I just say that it's a thing that has to be done. At the end of the letter I talk about the vacations we used to take up in this north country, at a place called Whitefish Lake, and how the scenery here reminds me of those good times. I tell them I'm fine. I tell them I'll write again from Winnipeg or Montreal or wherever I end up.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Over the next few weeks Linda wore her new red cap to school every day. She never took it off, not even in the classroom, and so it was inevitable that she took some teasing about it. Most of it came from a kid named Nick Veenhof. Out on the playground, during recess, Nick would creep up behind her and make a grab for the cap, almost yanking it off, then scampering away. It went on like that for weeks: the girls giggling, the guys egging him on. Naturally I wanted to do something about it, but it just wasn't possible. I had my reputation to think about. I had my pride. And there was also the problem of Nick Veenhof. So I stood off to the side, just a spectator, wishing I could do things I couldn't do. I watched Linda clamp down the cap with the palm of her hand, holding it there, smiling over in Nick's direction as if none of it really mattered. For me, though, it did matter. It still does. I should've stepped in; fourth grade is no excuse. Besides, it doesn't get easier with time, and twelve years later, when Vietnam presented much harder choices, some practice at being brave might've helped a little. Also, too, I might've stopped what happened next. Maybe not, but at least it's possible. Most of the details I've forgotten, or maybe blocked out, but I know it was an afternoon in late spring, and we were taking a spelling test, and halfway into the test Nick Veenhof held up his hand and asked to use the pencil sharpener. Right away a couple of kids laughed. No doubt he'd broken the pencil on purpose, but it wasn't something you could prove, and so the teacher nodded and told him to hustle it up. Which was a mistake. Out of nowhere Nick developed a terrible limp. He moved in slow motion, dragging himself up to the pencil sharpener and carefully slipping in his pencil and then grinding away forever. At the time, I suppose, it was funny. But on the way back to his seat Nick took a short detour. He squeezed between two desks, turned sharply right, and moved up the aisle toward Linda. I saw him grin at one of his pals. In a way, I already knew what was coming. As he passed Linda's desk, he dropped the pencil and squatted down to get it. When he came up, his left hand slipped behind her back. There was a half-second hesitation. Maybe he was trying to stop himself; maybe then, just briefly, he felt some small approximation of guilt. But it wasn't enough. He took hold of the white tassel, stood up, and gently lifted off her cap. Somebody must've laughed. I remember a short, tinny echo. I remember Nick Veenhof trying to smile. Somewhere behind me, a girl said, "Uh," or a sound like that. Linda didn't move.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She dug into her overalls pocket, pulled out a pocketknife and opened the small blade. We all watched as she made a thin slice across the pad of her index finger and a drop of blood welled up to the surface. Carla held out her finger. Charlie cut each of us, then we meshed our bloody fingers against one another’s to seal the deal. “Okay,” I said. “Give me the markers.” “You’ve got to do it first, then we’ll give them to you,” Charlie said. Daniel unbuckled his pants and pushed them off his hips. I unbuttoned my jeans. Our pants sagged around our hips while the girls watched, eyes wide. Daniel stepped up to me and pushed his pale hips in my direction, his tiny, limp penis nudging against my vagina. I looked at the girls. Charlie held her hand over mouth, then removed it to shriek, “Oh my God, that is so disgusting!” A wave of shame washed over me. I grabbed my pants, yanking them up as the girls started to run away. “Hey!” I screamed, trying to button and move at the same time. Their laughter echoed at me. I grabbed a stone and threw it in their direction, but it fell to the ground a few feet away. They were gone. “Shit!” I said. “I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He shoved his shirt into his pants, his light brown eyes soft with an affection that I couldn’t understand. My chest was tight with anger that threatened to turn to tears. “Stay away from me,” I hissed. In that instant I could see that he knew that we were not friends and never would be. He ducked his head and walked away while I remained rooted, hyperventilating. Over the course of just one year in Synanon, between the ages of six and seven, it seemed I had lived a lifetime. The little girl who wore pigtails and short skirts and attended etiquette school and learned to say, “If you please, ma’am,” followed with a gracious curtsy, was no more. In her place was someone I doubted that any of my family would recognize. I strutted about in my blue jeans, white t-shirt and cowboy boots, my speech quick and peppered with the f-word. Anyone in Synanon who didn’t learn to talk fast and take up space was verbally run over by others. In the game there was usually a point when everyone turned on one person. You had to know how to take it and not crumble when ten, fifteen or twenty people all screamed at you, telling you what a fucker you were, a complete shithead, not worth two cents. The gamers would lean forward in their chairs, eyes wide, neck veins popping, fingers pointing as if invisible leashes held them from springing forward to devour the person in the hot seat. The rule was that you must stay in your chair. “I’m going to tear you apart! You’re gonna wish you were dead!” they’d yell.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  In the mirror, a different little girl stared back at me, a girl whose head was too small for the rest of her body, her dark eyes now seemingly enlarged. I had become an alien like the others. I didn’t want to look at my reflection, but I couldn’t stop staring. The woman bent down to my level. Her eyes glowed with an intensity I would later learn to recognize as fanaticism. “Look how beautiful you are now.” I knew she was lying, trying to make me feel better about what she had done. Why had she done it, I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t seem to talk. I wanted to tell her I needed to go home—that I’d changed my mind; I didn’t want to be at Synanon anymore. Where was my mom? My thoughts clamored like frantic spectators at a show where things had gone drastically wrong. My words were stuck. “Today you are a new person, a Synanon kid. Today is your birthday,” the woman said. It wasn’t my birthday. My birthday was in October. “It’s your Synanon birthday,” she explained, as if she could read my thoughts. “Now what do you say?” I had no idea what she meant or what she wanted me to tell her. I felt numb. “You’re welcome,” she said in the absence of the “thank you” she’d anticipated from me. She smiled and watched for my reaction. I stretched my lips, imitating the woman, and the haunted-eyed alien in the mirror smiled back. I didn’t want to be her, so I looked away. After brushing me off and cleaning up the mess of my shorn hair, she took my hand again and led me back to the other children, who hovered around me. One spoke up, asking, “Who’s going to be her buddy?” “Theresa will decide,” the woman said. My mother returned shortly, much to my relief. In her arms she carried a box that held everything necessary for making popcorn. I immediately ran to her side. She oohed and aahed over my new appearance, although I felt embarrassed to my very core. “We are going to have a party to celebrate your coming to stay with us and your new birthday,” she said, seeming not to notice my discomfort. “But first I want to introduce you to a special friend of mine. This is Sophie. She’s going to be your buddy.” I looked at the chubby, potbellied child with the large, round head and round, rosy cheeks. So it’s a girl, I thought. She had been clinging to my mom ever since she’d come back into the room, and watching her, a faint feeling of jealousy tickled at my throat. I wanted to be the one at my mother’s side. I was her daughter, not this boyish-looking girl who possessively held her arm. As Sophie’s round, eager eyes took me in she leaned in closer to my mother, claiming the space.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  A moment of deep self loathing makes not drinking seem your only conceivable option. But I know that day how swiftly such moments pass, how cunning, baffling, and powerful my own logic can be. My head is grinding inside like a peppermill, and by dawn, a hangover has landed a cold hatchet in the back of my skull. After horking up my stomach contents in Radcliffe Yard, I drive to the home of poet Thomas Lux and his wife. On sultry summer days, Dev played with their toddler daughter while Tom and his wife barbecued for a ragtag gaggle of writers. Since his wife toils as tirelessly as Warren, Tom and I occasionally meet in a park or meander our strollers through a mall crawl. In grad school, before he’d been domesticated, Tom outdrank every two-fisted sot who came through. His escapades were passed around with the cheap wine. A die-hard Red Sox fan, he’d once broken his toe kicking a hole in the wall after a grisly loss to Cincinnati. A girlfriend who caught him cheating dumped his clothes out the window onto a New York street. Then in a Cambridge bookstore years later, he tipped up his sunglasses to show his clear eyes while announcing to me he’d stopped drinking. That morning after my weepy crash, I stand snot-nosed before Tom and his wife in their breakfast nook, waiting for both of them to deliver some healing whap in the head. Great, Tom says instead. You’ll get sober, and your poems will get better, and your kid will grow up with a happy mother. 25ReprieveGod is the voice that says, “I am not here.” —Don DeLillo, Falling Man After sitting through a local hospital talk on getting sober, I approach the thirty-year-old doctor who’d been at the mike the way a thirsty dog approaches a water dish, and she sits with me outside on the hospital steps under a mist-drenched moon. It looks like nothing so much as a dissolving aspirin, vague and bitter at its edges as I feel. As I’d twitched in my seat, shaking and jonesing for a drink, her fresh-scrubbed face and sleek chignon had evoked some pampered childhood full of ballet recitals. But at age thirteen—long before med school—she’d been living on the street, giving blow jobs at the bus terminal for dope. Sober for fourteen years, she’d just finished her residency. And for that, she credits a god I can’t believe in. But I’m desperate enough that night not to struggle so much as before. I tell her how Mother’s radical overhaul for years might be convincing me that sobriety can transform others, just not me. (Thank you, Mother, for saving yourself so conspicuously that it saved us both.) On the moonlit step, the young intern addresses me as I used to speak to the Down syndrome women I taught, so slowly that I can see her tongue move, saying I have a disease. It’s progressive and fatal.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Three days later, he woke with a crushing headache, and his first thought was, Boy do I need a cigarette. So he patted around on the front of his shirt and pulled out a stogie. Then he drew the Bic lighter from his pants pocket and rubbed up a single flame. He didn’t hear the explosion as the walls of the room were blown out. In his next conscious instant, he was smoldering in his neighbor’s yard with his brows singed off. When have I laughed so hard in company at the specter of human frailty? Not since the last great poetry reading I’d sat through, when some outcast put a fresh name on the unnamable. I don’t know what I expected here—a bunch of guys who crawled out from alleys or under bridges looking for hot coffee and a bowl of soup. But the folks around me look mostly present and clear-eyed. Among the academics and guys in suits sit working people—chamber maid, garage mechanic, diner waitress. I recognize the Latino guy who pours my coffee at the local donut shop. When they share—a word that right off makes me want to dip snuff—about how hard it is to make the rent or whether the exhaust system wired together by a coat hanger will hold, I realize how far I’ve moved from the people I grew up around. The next instant a gray-haired lady in pearls smiles at me, and I turn away, thinking, I’m not like you, lady…. Nonetheless, I raise my hand a few inches, but when I don’t get called on, I yank it down and start sitting on it again. How far I’ve fallen from the hand-flapping freshman, how saturated in shame. That flip-flop keeps going on inside, as if opposing inner judo masters take turns body-slamming each other. One minute I’m thinking, They’re not all that strange. The next, their laughter bounces off me like bullets from a Kevlar vest. I go outside to smoke. In the common across from me, the bare trees are twisted into agonized forms. The bronze cannons seem aimed straight at my sternum. I look back at the lighted windows and hear a woman’s unintelligible voice. The door opens a crack, and in the spilled, triangular glow, a tall kid wearing a red bandana over his streaming brown hair slips out. He stops six feet away and bends slightly forward—almost a butler’s bow—saying, Excuse me, Miss Karr. Mind if I join you? Who is he? With his formal demeanor and gold granny glasses, he could be a student—some Ivy League suck-up. Join away, I say, adding as I flash my wedding ring, I’m a miz. My goodness gracious, ma’am, he says, those are some seriously blinding stones you’re flaunting. We met before…

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐλέγχω Hom., etc.: fut. ἐλέγέω Ar. Nub. 1043, etc.: aor. ἤλεγξα Hom., Att.:—Pass., ἐλεγχθήσομαι Antipho 120. 21, Xen.: aor. ἠλέγχθην Eur. Hel. 885, Antipho |.c., Plat.: pf. ἐλήλεγμαι Plat. Legg. 805 C; cf. ἐξελέγχω. 710 disgrace, put to shame, μῦθον ἐλ. to treat a speech with contempt, Il. 9. 522; ἐλ. τινά to put one to shame, Od. 21. 424.—This usage is only Homeric, cf. ἔλεγχος (τό), ἐλεγχής. II. to cross- examine, question, for the purpose of convincing, convicting, or refuting, disproving or reproving, to censure, accuse, Hdt. 2. 115; μὴ 'λεγχε TOV πονοῦντα Aesch. Cho. 919; φύλαξ ἐλέγχων φύλακα Soph. Ant. 260; τί ταῦτ᾽ ἐλέγχεις ; Id. O. T. 333, cf. 783; ἔλεγχ᾽, ἐλέγχου Ar. Ran. 857; ἐλ. τινὰ περί τινος Id. Pl. 574; ἕνεκά τινος Antiph. Τραυμ. 1.10; τινά τι Plat. Lys. 222 D; c. acc. et inf. to accuse one of doing, Eur, Alc. 1058; with a relat., ἐλ. τινὰ ei .. Aesch. Cho. 851, Ar. Eq. 1232; ἐλ. τινὰ ws οὐ καλῶς λέγει Plat. Soph. 259 A, cf. Gorg. 470 C :—Pass. to be convicted, Hdt. 1. 24,1173 ἐλεγχόμενοι, εἴ τι περιγένοιτο τῶν χρημάτων Dem. 935-11, cf. Plat. Prot. 331 C and D; with part., ἐλεγχθεὶς διαφθείρας Antipho 110. 2, cf. 120.17; ἐλεγχθήσεται γελοῖος dy Xen. Mem. 1. 7, 2: 2. of arguments, to bring to the proof, τὸ πρᾶγμ᾽ ἐλ. Aesch. Ag. 1351: to disprove, confute, Dem. 836.10; and so, to reject, Luc. Nigr. 4; χρυσὸς κληῖδας ἐλέγχει proves that they avail not, Anth. P. 5. 217 :---- absol. to bring convincing proof, ws ἀνάγκη ἐλέγχει Hdt. 2. 22; περί τινος Dem. 516. 1; and then generally to prove, Lat. arguere, Thuc. 6. 86, cf. Aesch. Ag. 1351; τὸ πρᾶγμ᾽ ἐλεγχθέν Ar. Eccl. 485. 3. in the Logic of Arist. to prove by a reductio ad impossibile, ὅσα ἔστιν ἀποδεῖξαι, ἐστὶ καὶ ἐλέγξαι τὸν θέμενον τὴν ἀντίφασιν τοῦ ἀληθοῦς Soph. Elench. 9. I. 4. generally, to conquer, στρατιὰν ὠκύτατι ἐλ. Pind. P. 11.74, cf. Dion. P. 750. ἐλεγκτήρ — λελίχθων. ἑλεδέμας. corrupt reading of the Mss. in Aesch. Theb. 83; v. πεδιοπλόκτυπος. ἐλεδώνη, 4, a kind of polypus, Arist. H. A. 4. 1, 27, Henioch., πολ. τ. ἑλέειν, Ep. resolved form of ἑλεῖν, inf. aor. 2 of aipéw, Hom. ἐλεεινο-λογέομαι, Dep. to speak piteously, Hermog. ἐλεεινολογία, 4, a piteous appeal, ἐλ. καὶ δείνωσις Plat. Phaedr. 272 A.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I think, It is different. Pot was never my problem—true enough—compared to the all-day bong-blowing, resin-scraping drug dealers I’d lived with—true enough. I view my hand reaching for the joint as if on a movie screen. The sober part of myself is vanished entire. The coal on the burning stick flares as I draw on it, then I hold the sweet smoke as it creeps up my spine to my brain stem, where a tight-closed lotus starts to flower open. Exhaling, I blow away all those creepy people from the church basement. The wind wafts them off into summer dust motes. Later, my friends tuck me in a car, then stand, their arms waving side to side with the liquidy motion of seaweed while I ease off. I roll the window down so my hair streams along the side. The edges of the road have softened, the trees are giant scrambles of green fuzz. Just past the Star Market, right before the road splits to wrap around the local pond, my left blinker clicks on of its own volition, and my car tires cant to cut across the traffic. The vehicle surges into the liquor store parking lot. Ten days clean at this point, I tell myself I’ve straightened out, and a little wine with dinner won’t hurt…. Waking up with the outline of Warren’s back—all I ever see of him—I feel soldered to the bed, with cobwebs yards long grown from head to floor. For an instant I convince myself the binge was an awful dream. Then the tinny taste in my gummed-up mouth floods me with self-loathing. So I find myself in the shit-brown aluminum chair again. The guy at the front asking if anybody’s had a drink since the last group, and though I wonder about raising my hand, it hangs in the air of its own accord. I tell them I’m no alcoholic, but I’d shared a passed joint with a former boss, not wanting to seem like an ingrate. I fail to mention the five-dollar bottle of wine I’d drained later. Part of me expects to be handed some kind of hall pass that says the occasional joint—when part of a necessary business interaction—is okay. Another part of me thinks—hopes?—the group police will charge down the aisle, hoist me up by the shoulders, then show me the door. But I haven’t yet seen anybody get kicked out, even a hallucinating homeless dude and one individual with Tourette’s syndrome who once hollered out, I wanna suck your titties. Over the months, I keep going back to the bottle, though with each relapse, I come back one notch humbler, more willing to take a suggestion I’ve scorned.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  5 Never Mind You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it. —George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” My first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears. Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems. Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time. Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims. Your complicated mother. Your absent father. We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still. Tell it again. In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife. Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her. Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding... You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings. Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy. Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night? We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble. For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves. I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray. Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I once saw Dev, whose sandwich that day was, as most days, a peon’s peanut butter and jelly, try to urge Jonathan into swapping lunches. Young Jonathan peeled back one corner of his seven-grain bread carefully enough not to break the crust. Dev peered in. Jonathan said, Mine is brie and kiwi fruit. Dev reached for it, and Jonathan cupped one hand around it. It has less sugar than yours. His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna…. Perhaps Evan’s flinch stemmed from the day Dev had elected to yank Jonathan’s mittens from his coat pocket, bolt up the stairs while Evan and Warren chased after him, and fling them into the toilet. Warren fished them out with a pencil and offered to launder them. When I got the ziploc bag from my husband, I tossed the mittens into the trash among the potato peelings. I just didn’t want to deal with them—or the whole starchy Cambridge milieu. So the mittens stop me dropping Dev off, or the puking. My head spends much of its day pumping out reasons for not doing what I should the way a magician draws long strings of scarves from a sleeve. Warren drops him now, an act that brings him endless praise. How great, the teachers say every day when I fetch Dev, that Warren drops him off! And isn’t it great that I pick him up? Then spend all day and night with him? I once asked. From their stunned expressions, I could guess that it wasn’t. Not so much. About once a week Warren asks for the laundered mittens, and I pretend to rummage around before wandering away, giving in to my failure as a laundress—read: mother. The other couples in the center look so blithe. They plead academic poverty but drive swanky foreign cars and live sweatered in cashmere. They take family vacations in beachy climes with grandparents who plunk seashells into buckets their toddler grandchildren tote while the couple slips off to the local bookstore or bakery to canoodle over steaming coffee. Our nearest grandparents are assiduously hands-off. Though Mrs. Whitbread had cranked out six kids like linked hot dogs, Warren’s upbringing was almost Victorian in its chill. By his testament, he’d been presented from time to time like a petit four, scrubbed up and bathrobed before bedtime for kisses. Otherwise, he’d been banished to a gulag nursery guarded by some icy servant. During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I’m unemployed, with school loans I can’t pay, an invalid dad whose nursing I need to start chipping in on. When I lift my index finger, the barman wipes his hands and refills my snifter. I’m the sole customer—the barman having just covered his olives and cherries with cling film—when he nonchalantly slides a white slip of paper to me. I nonchalantly flip it over. The bill comes to twenty dollars. Hold it, I say, those two bought my other drinks. I’m well buzzed by then, wavering. I know, he says. This is for the third one. I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars? He nods . I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now? His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers. He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it. I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till. Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money. So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in. In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter. Pretty soon Warren comes in wearing a down jacket, looking tall enough to offset my busgirl scumminess. I draw him aside and explain, perhaps slurrily, why I need a twenty, just till the next day. I want to pay off the glaring barman posthaste. But Warren stares in disbelief, saying, When Tom and I drink with his friend for four hours, the whole bill isn’t twenty dollars. By this time the manager has set his coffee cup on the bar alongside his keys. Warren says, Why didn’t you go to the machine ? I haven’t gotten an ATM card yet, I say. Where’s your credit card?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She says, Do you feel there’s something missing from your body? Funny you say that, I say. I do. Some absence. That’s just how I’d describe it. She waits for me to say more, but I can’t think how to elaborate without bursting into lunatic laughter, so I try another tack. The big problem when I came in was my head, I say. If there had been a transplant list, I’d have signed on. Does this head of yours urge you to hurt yourself? she asks. (Is it paranoia that causes me to hear enthusiasm?) I tell her no. I feel like an asshole about the whole thing. I want to get better. I want to work on my marriage and be a better mom. I want to stay sober. Rubbing her hands together again, she asks, Not even any fantasies about suicide? Are you cutting yourself? I never did that, I say. Never? she says, adding, Most people who set out to hurt themselves rely on self-destructive acts for relief. She sounds disappointed. My relief is that I didn’t hurt myself, I say. My thinking was skewed by years of drinking—there’s your destructive behavior. You’re the one who told me alcohol’s a depressant. Any fantasies about hurting your child? Hurting your husband? she asks, probing like a dentist for a raw nerve. I’ve already done that, I say. You seem upset. I’m in a mental institution. Less than a month after a suicide attempt. Suicidal gesture. (You pick up the distinct lingo your chart needs pretty fast in those hallways.) How are you prepared to manage your life any better? The antidepressants have obviously kicked in— They should’ve kicked in before you arrived. Well, then I’m rested for the first time in years. I ask people for help all the time. All I do is ask for help. I make, like, five calls a day to people in recovery to talk about how I feel. I talk to all the nurses. Yet you think you don’t belong here. I belonged here when I came. Now I’m taking up somebody else’s spot. I wait till the end of the session to show her the Radcliffe letter (though with a shrink I trusted, I’d have gone bounding in like a puppy). She cocks a waxed eyebrow, saying that the treatment team will judge whether I’m able to go to the orientation. She’s concerned that my regular therapist is still out of the country. You’ve been in touch with her. She’ll be back by Labor Day, I say, and I’m on the mend. But you have me, she says. How lucky is that? I say, and I mold my features into the unwilled smile of a store-bought doll. As part of my program to look like a model inmate, I organize something I call Health and Beauty Day. Joan has been called to the West Coast to nurse her father in hospice.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen’s lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don’t let me be her, don’t let me be her. For however she’d pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second. In the morning when I stirred, my eyes lasered on to her supine form in the next bed. She was nearly done with Hundred Years of Solitude. She still had her hat on, pushed back on her head to give her the wondering expression of Charlie Chaplin. My hat had a hole in it, which I didn’t remember incurring. My first blackout. When I pulled up to the green lawn of my college where dogs caught Frisbees in their chops, I decided to reinvent myself for that leafy place. I’d probably gotten in by wheedling a reference from the only professor back home I’d known well enough to bother. A lumbering drinking pal of Mother’s from the technical university where she’d gotten her teaching degree, he sported a meager russet beard with a skunk stripe and a French accent I later learned was fake. He’d first materialized on our sofa one morning, shoeless, his coat draped across him. The conventioneer’s name tag pasted to the breast pocket—apparently printed by the wife I never met—read, DON’T BRING HIM HOME HE’S GOT THE CAR!!! I liked the sentences he could spin out in midair, with commas and clauses and subclauses woven through. I liked how he oohed at the poetry I’d been encouraged to press on him since about age eleven. It was tricky to find the right moment—after I’d faked interest in Ming porcelain but before he got too lubricated to talk right. Having not seen him since I was in grade school, I felt pushy showing up in his office brandishing recommendation forms. But he’d said on the phone I could come, so I leaned in his open door slot to ask was he busy. He sat behind a desk sprawled with papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician. He closed the door behind me, then steered me to a chair facing his desk. I figured he’d decided against recommending me, having found the poems and essays I’d sent him in advance dim-witted. I felt oafish before him. No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he’d forgotten something. He walked to my side and—with a kind of slow ceremony I did nothing to stop—lifted my T-shirt till I was staring down at my own braless chest. With his trembling and sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By God, they’re real!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Joan wonders if the rest of us could manage such faith, and we strike a deal that we’ll all let go our own wills as openhandedly. In fact, until each of us has given up care of her life to some greater force for good, the group won’t go on. But I quibble so much about arcane definitions of will and care that the women wind up voting that I’ve surrendered already and am just being a bitch about it. And to their will, I yield, which is a start. With the group, I finally succumb to Joan’s long-running nag that I list stuff I feel most crappy about—every single grudge and humiliation—a private exercise we all talk about over a month or so. I break mine into columns with the crappy thing on the left, the particular way it hurt me in the middle, my part in it on the right. In some cases—being sexually assaulted, say—my part has been burying or ignoring the awful event in a way that restabs the wound. Almost eighty pages, mine gets to be. Theirs are way shorter, since they’ve done this before. Sitting in my posh office in low lamplight one Sunday, we unscrew Oreos and sip muddy coffee while privately rolling down our individual columns—we cherrypick what to share—and it floors me to see laid out how fear has governed pretty much my every moronic choice. I’ve never regarded myself as a fearful individual. I’ve hitchhiked in Mexico and blustered drunk into biker bars all mouthy. Those acts now strike me as more pitiful than brave—the sad bravado of a girl with little to lose. We’re supposed to go over the full grudge lists with another person, and Joan gives me a list of sober preachers and rabbis and priests who’ll listen. In my shame, I half expect a religious guy to hurl lightning bolts down on my head. A man with a thick Irish lilt answers one call. Come on over, he says. But would you mind bringing me a Coca-Cola? I crave the stuff and can’t afford it. I wind up in a room facing a guy in a monk’s robe, a giant crucifix hanging from his belt like a scalp. Brother Francis (not his name) is over eighty and skeletally thin, with sunken cheeks and blue veins all over an age-spotted skull. The liter of Coke sits on the low table between us, alongside an ashtray. The instant I sit down, he pulls out a pack of rolling papers and constructs an immaculate ciggie while I light up. Both of us smoke like tar kilns the whole time as legal pads I flip through quickly pile in my lap—minor offenses. But when it comes to the wreckage of my romantic past, I stall, holding my styrofoam cup as I press my thumbnail around the rim in a series of half moons. We seem to have reached an impasse, he says.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “I thought so. Doesn’t matter.” He stretched out his hands and laid them on the table. “She’s tired of our lives now. Certainly by now she’s gone on to . . . well, I’m sure her doings would seem bizarre even to us. Still, I notice she has no compunction about steering you back into the tangles of what she, no doubt, considers a swamp.” He noticed that when he touched the table Peggy-Ann’s fingers retreated into her lap, meshed in a pale knot. “I’m also sure she didn’t misrepresent us. Can you tell me why you thought you would enjoy it here?” She shook her head again. “Oh, I’m so sor . . .” That word failed. She tried three more; could make no sound; could only beg with her eyes. He let the chair legs tap down. “We’ll let it go by saying you just wanted to see for yourself. I dare say you’ve done quite a bit of ‘experimenting’ in your . . . time. You’re very attractive. Are you twenty yet?” She hazarded a nod. “Older?” With a small jerking motion, she shook: no. “I dare say you’re also bright. Catherine never had time for stupid women. Or stupid men either.” “I . . . I didn’t know her well.” “Then your intellect must have impressed her very much, if she recommended us so quickly.” “I feel so . . . silly . . .” in a voice that communicated only terror. “No. Not silly. You have quite a lot of time left to wander this globe. You must find out who you are. So. You’ve discovered, now, you are the sort of person who can enjoy such things as pass in these rooms only in fantasies—eh?” Her eyes jerked back up to his. He laughed. “There, with your pretty green eyes and your red hair all awry—” Her hands started for her hair, stopped when Proctor laughed again.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  forced to have an abortion due to the Rh factor of her blood. I didn’t know what an Rh factor was, but I’d been immediately hooked. Heidi’s plight, also revealed on the first page, involved an older girl’s dubious plan to deposit Heidi, who’d been placed in the girl’s charge, at the top of the mountain with a relative known as the Alm-Uncle. While they walked through the little village of Dorfli, a place that seemed as interesting to me as the inside of a shoebox, various residents inquired as to the girl’s destination, each expressing a sense of concern about the prospect of Heidi being left with the uncle. After twenty minutes I’d read only about three pages and could barely recall any of the story. I tried to speed-read, picking up bits and pieces of pertinent information, but was left with muddled images in no sequential order: wild flowers, a frowning uncle, fresh air, happy child. The hour dripped by, and I jumped at the sound of a timer. “How far have you read?” I looked up at my teacher’s flat face and down at the book in my lap. For the last thirty minutes I had been trying desperately to absorb the words. I had no idea where I was in the story because I’d skipped around in increasing panic. I chose a page at random and watched my teacher’s lips tighten when she held out her hand for the book. “Tell me what’s been happening so far in the story,” she said. I stared at her, trying to think. I didn’t know. I couldn’t talk. I just stood there. She set the book aside. “You have been fooling people into thinking that you’re a reader. You are slow and have zero recall or comprehension of what you read.” She opened a folder and made a note. “You can leave now.” I suppose my love of books began with my earliest memories of my mother reading Goodnight Moon to me. It began, “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And there were three little bears sitting on chairs and two little kittens and a pair of mittens and a little toy house

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  old I reasoned to myself that Ray’s story of Maitreya coming to enlighten humanity was unlikely. “Whatever you are doing, wherever you are, he will appear before you to bring his message,” Ray continued. “If you are watching TV, he will come through the channel to talk to you.” “Isn’t that far out?” Theresa said. I nodded while Melissa smirked at her tea. “They’re crazy,” she said once we were outside their dorm. Because I admired Melissa, her words were cutting, and I felt a flash of shame. Later, she complained to one of the demonstrators about Theresa and Ray, saying that they were trying to push religion on us. Synanon did not tolerate religiosity. The only devotion Synanon members were allowed was devotion to Chuck. Melissa’s complaint prompted another ban on my spending time with Theresa and discussion among the demonstrators about whether she and Ray were mentally fit enough for children to be around. An official complaint was made to management. Ray’s things were confiscated, and he was sent to work camp for a week. During the evening hours when Theresa and Ray were alone in their room, they began to discuss their growing dissatisfaction with Synanon and the possibility of leaving. To leave the community was an undertaking that seemed insurmountable to many of the residents. Living in such an insulated society for so many years and being told regularly that it would be almost impossible to survive outside of Synanon made many people afraid to leave. To leave meant severing ties with close friends and sometimes children if one parent left while the other stayed. There were also restrictions against taking money or items of value. Synanon management purposely made leaving difficult, thereby quashing any incentive to start a new life and inciting fear of the world outside of Synanon . Management wanted community members to see leaving not as a positive beginning, but a punishment. Even with the squeeze, it was still hoped that the Synanite would make the right